On a late November morning years ago, we crossed Central Park. I remember the bare trees along the way and the glacial air and the sodden earth underfoot, and I remember unleashed dogs scampering about in the mist with steam rising from their snouts while their owners stood jittering, rubbing their palms. When we reached Fifth Avenue, we scraped the mud off our shoes, entered the Frick Collection, and, before we knew it, were facing Corot’s Ville-d’Avray and moments later Corot’s Boatman of Mortefontaine, followed by Corot’s Pond. I had seen the paintings several times before, but this time, perhaps because of the weather, I realized something I’d never considered. I was about to tell my friend that Corot had captured Central Park perfectly, that looking at the boatman in the paintings reminded me of the scene we’d just left behind by the deserted boathouse on Seventy-Second Street, when I realized that I had gotten things entirely in reverse. It was not that Corot reminded me of the park, but that if the park meant anything to me now, it was because it bore the inflection of Corot’s subdued melancholy. Central Park suddenly felt more real to me and was more stirring, more lyrical, and more beautiful because of a French painter who’d never even set foot in Manhattan. I liked the cold weather more now, the dogs, the scrawny trees, the damp and barren landscape that no longer felt late autumnal but that was starting to glow with peculiar reminders of early spring. New York as I’d never seen it before.
But just as I was about to explain this reversal, I began to see something else. I remembered the Ville-d’Avray I had visited as a young man, years earlier, in France, and how I’d been struck by its beauty, not because of the town and its natural environs but because of Serge Bourguignon’s depiction of it in his 1962 film Les dimanches de la Ville-D’Avray (a.k.a. Sundays and Cybele). Now the film too was imposing itself on Corot and on New York, and Corot himself was being projected back onto the film. Only then did I realize that what truly attracted me to the paintings was something I’d never observed before. It explained why—despite all these mirrorings and reversals and despite the sky verging on the gray and the untended landscape over which hovered Corot’s muted lyricism—what I loved in each painting and what had suddenly buoyed my mood was a mirthful spot of red on the boatman’s hat. That hat caught my attention like an epiphany on a gloomy day in the country. Now it’s what I come to see each time I’m at the Frick, and it’s why I love Corot. It’s the tiny baby in the king cake, like a subtle hint of lipstick on a stunning face, like an unforeseen afterthought, the mark of genius that reminds me each time that I like to see other than what I see until I notice what’s right before me.